The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to beam management for connected mode discontinuous reception (C-DRX) operation.
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, (e.g., a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, or a New Radio (NR) system). A wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations or access network nodes, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple communication devices, which may be otherwise known as user equipment (UE).
Some wireless communications systems (e.g., NR systems) may operate at higher frequencies or use multiple beams for communications between wireless devices. Such operations may be subject to higher path losses. Signal processing techniques, such as beamforming, may be used to combine energy coherently and overcome the higher path losses in these systems. UEs in such systems may operate in a connected mode discontinuous reception (C-DRX) mode (e.g., support low-power/sleep states to conserve power), and may wake up occasionally (e.g., during a C-DRX ON duration) to check for a grant received from a base station in, for example, a downlink control region of a downlink transmission. In some cases, however, one or more active beam pairs between two wireless devices may become misaligned (e.g., during a C-DRX OFF duration), which may result in beam and/or communication failure such as control channel decoding failures. Thus, improved techniques for beam management during C-DRX operation may be desired.